Confidex introduces RFID tags for automotive applications

Confidex, a manufacturer of RFID tags, has announced the introduction of two new passive UHF EPC Generation 2 RFID tagging solutions: the Confidex Corona and the Confidex Cruiser.

The new RFID tags, which have been undergoing customer trials with European automotive manufacturers for several months, are specifically targeted at providing discrete visibility of high-value, work-in-process items in demanding automotive manufacturing environments.

The Confidex Corona tag was specifically designed to perform in the challenging environments found in the industrial electrophoretic painting processes used in the automotive industry. 

‘The automotive industry, with highly automated manufacturing processes and intense competition among manufacturers, is consistently challenged to manage production flow and provide work-in-process visibility,’ said Jarkko Miettinen, Confidex VP of business development. ‘By working closely with our customers, we have been able to develop a tagging solution that addresses a long identified business problem not previously possible with standards-based UHF EPC Gen2 RFID tags.’

The objective of current customer trials is to achieve an identification system that employs an RFID tag attached at the very beginning of the car manufacturing process that meets the cost targets of replacing a legacy barcode system. The tag must survive and continue functioning properly throughout the entire car production process while firmly attached to the chassis. These tags are subjected to several chemical baths, painting and cleansing processes, very high temperatures, and physical stresses. The new Confidex Corona tag ‘stands up to these demanding requirements’, says the company.

The Confidex Cruiser is a durable, passive RFID tag that provides tire manufacturers with discrete visibility of tires across the supply chain. This new UHF Class 1 Gen 2-compliant RFID label is applied to the inside of the tire during manufacturing and is designed to withstand the high heat and pressure required during the tire curing process.
With a read range of 3-4 meters until the tires are mounted on customer vehicles, Cruiser provides tire manufacturers and their retail trading partners complete end-to-end visibility for these difficult-to-track, high value items. Typical applications for the Cruiser tag include work-in-process tracking, supply chain item level tracking, inventory management and retail point of sale.

The Corona and Cruiser join the existing Confidex family of durable, on-metal UHF EPC Gen 2 RFID tagging solutions currently supporting the needs of the automotive industry.  The Confidex Ironside, Survivor, and Steelwave tags have been successfully used in a variety of industrial asset tracking applications such as identification of IT assets, vehicles, rail cars, and reusable transit items, in motion, from arctic to subtropical regions.